Union Bullying in Las Vegas
Joecks said this is par for the course for this particular union, which is affiliated with UNITE HERE and the AFL-CIO:
For years the Las Vegas Culinary Workers Union has wanted to unionize Station Casino properties. Instead of having secret ballot elections, which Station has said they would not oppose, Culinary Union bosses want to take away secret ballots from all Station workers and organize using card check. Union bosses love organizing by card check, because it allows them to target, harass and intimidate workers into signing a piece of paper, instead of having to win a secret ballot election.
From protesting during a fundraiser for a local Catholic school to trying to intimidate the Tony Hawk Foundation, Culinary Union bosses show that their real interest is in power for themselves, even if it means disrupting events that are trying to raise money to help needy children.
You can see this attitude in their letter when the Culinary union boss Geoconda Arguello-Kline writes, “We expect a response from you within the next ten days.” It’s outrageous for a union boss to try and make an organization dedicated to serving underprivileged children a pawn in the union’s attempt to take away the secret ballot from workers.
PJM attempted to contact both Arguello-Kline and another union official referenced in the letter, Maya Homes, for comment, but calls were not returned.
It is possible, of course, that the list of offenses referenced in the letter — including spying on workers and wrongful termination — were committed by Station Casinos. It would be far from the first time employers overstepped their bounds.
However, that has nothing to do with the Tony Hawk Foundation and its work, nor with the Catholic school that held its fundraiser there. It appears to be just one more attempt by a union to force its agenda on an employer and employees who may not be interested.
If Culinary Workers Union, Local 226 is truly interested in the wishes of workers at Station Casinos, they should agree to a free, fair, and secret ballot, not attempt to bully organizations which are not involved.
I’m not all that up to speed on private sector labor law, being a public sector creature, but it seems to me that putting pressure on an entity not directly involved in a labor dispute is a prohibited secondary boycott. If there were a National Labor Relations Board or a Justice Department that were anything but fronts for the Soros Cabal and the communist SOB that the 52% of Americans who are idiots elected, somebody would bring charges.
Unions trying to bully (some would say intimidate and blackmail) businesses into using union labor? Wow, now THAT is news. Try opening up a non-union restaurant in a city like New York. Or try to build a major building in New York without union labor. Good luck to you. For decades unions have been intimidating and blackmailing businesses all over the country. That’s why the vote in Wisconsin in a few weeks is so important. It will show that the country is fighting back against these unions and that, in most cases, lots of money can be saved once the oppressive union wages are not paid and union contracts are not used, espcially when dealing with state workers. Wisconsin could mark the beginning of the end of the stranglehold organizations like SEIU and the AFL-CIO (and let’s not even talk about the Teamsters) have on this nation. And it’s about time.
I spent my career working under a state public sector collective bargaining law that is similar to the federal Labor-Management Relations Act as it was before the Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin amendments in ’48 and ’56, IRRC, so my law doesn’t have all the secondary boycott and other secondary activity prohibitions of the federal law. Consequently, I’m basically working on what I remember from labor law courses in the ’70s. That said: it is not per se illegal for a union to pressure or attempt to intimidate the company it desires to organize or to get under a contract. In fact, economic pressure on the parties is the very essence of the collective bargaining process as it orginally was intended to work. What is illegal is the secondary boycot in which a union tries to pressure another employer to not do business with a company because it has a labor dispute with that company. Both secondary boycotts and hot cargo actions (refusal to handle the product of a company involved in a labor dispute) are illegal, but there is almost never any enforcement action by the NLRB and, frankly, there is a Hellish price to be paid by companies who go to the courts to enforce their rights, see, e.g., the recent Boeing “settlement.” You may rest assured that somebody in the Soros Junta told Boeing management that Boeing aircraft were going to start to have all sorts of safety issues that would require the attention of the entire FAA, and, BTW, the US military really had no further need for any Boeing products; it gets that bad, especially the safety scams against both manufacturers and airlines. You really have no way of knowing if the airline you’re planning to fly has safety issues; if they’re getting along with the IAM, the FAA is willing to look the other way a lot, especially during a Democrat administration, if they’re not getting along with the IAM, then it starts to rain safety and maintenance practice complaints and every IAM union steward is an heroic whistleblower.
The real issue isn’t the unions’ power to intimidate employers; employers can take care of themselves under the federal law and even most state laws, my state’s very wide open law included. What employers can’t withstand is the union engaging the government to do its dirty work of intimidation, which it can do in any Democrat administration at any level of government and even can do in a lot of Republican governments because Republicans are mostly stupid about union issues and also fail to properly muck out the Democrat appointees in their administrations. If HRC had won the Presidency, she’d have been happy to find most of WJC’s administration sitting there waiting for her at the Regional level and below even after 8 years of GWB. The federal prosecutors who mau-maued Senator Stevens and wreaked havoc on the Alaska legislature were all Clinton holdovers. The prosecutions have mostly been set aside, but they did get the Democrats a senator for the first time since 1980.
You are both right. We were up against a union in Chicago that had actually put in writing that they were not interested in organizing our employees, but were only looking to have us close our doors. The NLRB will not help an employer, no matter how egregious the facts, period. They are union employees, some still on pensions from the very unions they adjudicate matters on, and have no qualms about it.
So glad I live in a right to work state, gives me the right to tell a union rep to pound sand or get pounded if they asked me more than once. Unions are for the least common denominator types who need someone to pick up their slack which I refuse to do. I don’t need anyone to bargain on my behalf. My works speaks for itself.
Unions had their place, about 50 years or so ago.
Sounds as if Jimmy Hoffa is alive and well! In the UK we were so plagued with trade union trouble that even quite a few workers were disgusted. The unions did not hesitate to use violence(flying pickets) and intimidation—in one case demanding the sacking of a man who had worked, albeit temporaily, during a strike many years earlier. In short, they claimed to be a law unto themselves.
Enter Grunwick, a film processor, and Margaret Thatcher, whose nickname “the Iron Lady” both Heneral Galtieri in Argentina and Arthur Scargill in the National Union of Mineworkers were to discover was more true than the Soviets guessed.
What is intolerably odious, and the Culinary Workers Union must be told to like it or lump it, is the denial of the right of the workers to a secret ballot. In this that union is no better than tyrannous employers and landlords were in my country before the Ballot Act in 1872 effectively rendered such people powerless, and gave power to the people. And demand that includes withokding the right to secret ballot must be thrown out as soon as that emerges, and the right of the workers to engade in a secret ballot must be declared inviolable. If the union bosses won’t agree then – to quote Richard Ponet’s “Treatise of Politic Power”, written 450 years ago, but still worthy of remembrance – they are no better than tyrants, and worthy of the end of tyrants.
Let’s see?
The Station Casinos are owned by the Frank & Lorenzo Fertitta family, who also own the UFC which is run by Dana White.
Dana White was run out of South Boston by Whitey Bulger and his gang of irish hoodlums for failure to pay street tax.
My guess is thea the Fertitta Brothers have roots stretching back to Kansas City and Chicago, if you know what I mean.
Call Pesci and DeNiro, there has to be a movie here somewhere.
Unions destroy everything. They are like termites.
If I had received such an importunate letter, I would have responded with the suggestion that the union acquaint itself with the reply given by Private Eye’s lawyers in the matter of Arkell vs. Pressdram
http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/arkell.htm
George Knapp I believed did a show about this union on CoasttoCoastAM one Sunday. In the show it was said they were building bombs for the mob. So this doesn’t surprise me much. Just look at what the SEIU union did during 2010 Senate election to get Senator Reid re-elected. The Unions have a history of being thugs, crooks, and bigots just like the Democratic Party.
Did they originate from the plant Zardoz?
@ Billsocial….The unions have a history of being thugs, crooks, and bigots just like the Dem. party….They are one and the same…I am sure Gov. Walker will win in Wisc. and that will be a profound blow to the ‘labour party, USA’….I detest unions in the worst of ways….and anything related to these Destroying locost, aka Termites, maggots, parasites….etc….